If a test fails in the woods and no one is there to see it does anyone care, does anyone even notice. What happens when failing tests become the norm and you can't see the wood from the trees? 

After watching last years Allure Report presentation I was inspired.  Selenium tests (and automation tests in general) are often poorly understood by the team as a whole.  Reports/emails go unread with tests failing becoming an expected outcome rather than a glaring red flag.  We looked at what Allure brought to the table and from that base created a dashboard which was designed to:

• Display the results of test runs in a way that was useful to managers, testers and the rest of the development team.  Including tools to filter out specific test runs and view the overall trend of the test run results.
• Make debugging tests easier by grouping errors, displaying history of test results, filtering tests and offering visual comparison of test runs.
• Help mitigate the problems flaky tests cause with test run result reporting (say that three times fast).
• Help with our mobile device certification process, by easily providing a view to compare test runs across devices.

Since it's creation the dashboard has been used and praised by managers through to developers.  With our full suite of tests from unit to integration to selenium and appium being stored on the dashboard.  We've managed to:

• Decrease the time taken to debug test cases.
• Increase the visibility of all our test suites, with managers having a better idea of how our selenium test suite is progressing and testers better understanding the coverage of unit tests.
• Focus the organization on quality.

We are working with legal at present to have this project open sourced and available to all prior to Selenium Conf 2015.

Almost every manual QA started with Selenium IDE or at least tried it at some point.. retention rate is close to 0.

In this talk we will depict the challenges that Test Automation Developers face. We'll categorise the challenges, name them, and see the skillset required to overcome the difficulties.

We'll compare the different Record/Playback tools and see where they excel, and where we must resort to traditional solutions (e.g. generic programming languages, and the Page Object design).

This talk will discuss topics such as Reuse of code, Component Isolation, Separation of Concerns, APIs, where test fragility stem from and how to overcome it, etc..

The JSON Wire Protocol (JSONWP) is the version of the WebDriver spec currently implemented by all the Selenium clients. It defines an HTTP API that models the basic objects of web automation---sessions, elements, etc... The JSON Wire Protocol is the magic that powers Selenium's client/server architecture, enables services like Selenium Grid or Sauce Labs to work, and gives you the ability to write your test scripts in any language.

The JSONWP has served Selenium faithfully for a number of years, but the future of automated testing lies beyond the borders of the web browser. Mobile automation is an essential ingredient in any build, and tools like Appium or Selendroid have made it possible to run tests against mobile apps using the JSONWP. The JSONWP's current incarnation isn't enough to automate all the new behaviors that mobile apps support, however. Complex gestures, multiple device orientations, airplane mode, and the ability to use both native and web contexts, for example, are all essential to mobile automation.

For this reason the leaders of the Selenium project, in concert with other Selenium-based projects like Appium and Selendroid, met to discuss the future of the JSONWP. We've been working on its next version, called the "Mobile JSON Wire Protocol" (MJSONWP). Appium and Selendroid already implement much of the MJSONWP spec. In this talk I'll dive into the specifics of the MJSONWP extensions, how they relate to the original JSONWP, and how the Selenium clients have begun to implement them.

Finally, I will talk about the future of the MJSONWP and how it's related to the current and future versions of the WebDriver spec. I'll share how you can get help with the creation of the MJSONWP, and discuss issues with the authors of the new spec before the API is set in stone. We need the help of everyone who's involved in mobile automation to come up with the best and most future-proof version of the MJSONWP. Ultimately, your understanding of how Selenium works will be improved, and you'll have a much better handle on how projects like Appium and Selenium work together to make sure you have the best automation methods available.

How many times do we test the same things at multiple layers, multiple levels, adding time to the build process and testing cycle, delaying the feedback?

We know what to test and how to test, but what is the right place to test it?

In this workshop, we will demonstrate how as QA’s we can identify what tests can be classified as unit tests, integration test and functional test. Using a case study, we will see how each component can be tested as part of unit testing; the integration of different parts and the functioning of a software system as a whole and how functional tests fit into this big picture. We will then bring all these tests together to understand and build the testing pyramid and how it enables us to build the right testing framework with fewer selenium i.e functional tests.

Selenium WebDriver is a great tool, but it's not a testing library. It's a browser manipulation tool. There is a gap. 

Selenide adds a possibility for easy and stable testing.

Why yet another Selenium wrapper?

There are several testing libraries around Selenium webdriver. But it seems that they do not resolve the main problems of UI tests. Namely, instability of tests caused by dynamic content, JavaScript, Ajax, timeouts etc. Selenide was created to resolve these problems. With Selenide, you can forget all these common timing issues and concentrate on business logic.

Speed of UI automation has always been an issue when it comes to Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery. If UI automation suite takes 3 hours to complete, then any commit happens during this time will not be visible in test environment, because the next deployment will happen only after 3 hours. 

With 2000+ developers and average 250+ checkins per day, the above issues is replicated 250+ times every day. This is not productive and feedback cycle is super slow!

Another issue is , with 35+ different project teams using 10 or more different jenkins jobs to run their UI automation. So many jobs means (350+), individual teams need to go through the pain of managing their own jenkins job, its a duplicate effort and waste of time. Automation teams need to spend time on writing reliable automation and not managing jenkins jobs.

Solution is to reduce the UI automation run time from hours to minutes and also use only handful of jobs to run the Distributed Automation!

Goal: To run all UI automation scenarios within the time take by the longest test case

Traditional approach in performance testing does not include client side processing time (i.e. DOM Content Load, Page Render, JavaScript Execution, etc.) as part of response times, performance tests has always been conducted to stress the server so tools like Jmeter have been very popular to execute tests. With increasing complexity of architectures (Web, Browser, Mobile) on the client side it has been important to understand the real user experience.   Commercial tools have started to provide features that can provide insights into real user experience after the bytes are transferred to the client end.  With the ability to call Selenium scripts via Jmeter the ability to conduct real user experience tests using open source stack has opened up new avenues to comment on real user experience.   This enables us to comment on

• Provides Page load times similar to On Load time of real browsers
• Generates HAR file with following statistics
• Details of summary of request times and content types
• Waterfall chart with page download time breakdown statistics such as  DNS resolution time, Connection time, SSL handshaking time, Request send time, wait time and receive time.

By integrating the open source stack tools it enables us to provide the same insights which a commercial of the shelf tools would offer.   At Gallop we have implemented this at multiple clients providing them insights into various bottlenecks at the client side which helped us to provide greater value proposition

A big blocker for putting a website on truly continuous production delivery is the amount of time it take to validate that the site works correctly.  Tests themselves take time to run, and test results are unreliable to the point where it takes a human to investigate and interpret them.  When counting the time that it takes to both run and interpret results, test runs for an enterprise web site can take an entire day from inception to useful result.

This session describes common points of failure in test execution that add both latency and unreliability and what can be done to overcome them while still preserving the value of UI validation.  We'll discuss why, after addressing these concerns, UI can be unblocked to reliably field thousands of validation scenarios on a local machine in a matter of minutes. 

Manual Testing.  Depending on how you've been influenced by those two simple words, reactions vary from slight disgust to full-on depression.  Of course, the solution is clear: automate, but how do you get there when your company is continually pushing out the next big feature?  As the set of features to cover increases, the lack of scalability of manual testing becomes more apparent.

This is a problem that we struggled with at our company.  Automation tactics were explored and implemented, but problems persisted as proposed solutions did not cater to the demands of the manual testers.

After years of failure and disappointment, our latest stint resulted in success.  Not only do we have hundreds of automated tests across various platforms (mobile and web) and products, but manual testing has been eliminated with zero casualties.  As we move forward towards Continuous Delivery and improved automation performance, we wanted to take this moment to look back and share stories of failure and success.

Every language and framework which lives as long as Selenium has its fuckups.. and we're here to embrance them and joke about them.

E.g. JS Wat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqhZZNUyVFM

Visual Test Automation using Selenium

Visual Testing is the method of verifying that the application’s GUI appears correctly to its users. Most of the people say visual testing is hard to automate. Given the number of web browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, responsive design, internationalization, etc.) the nature of visual testing can be complex. But with existing open source and commercial solutions, this complexity is manageable, making it easier to automate than it once was, since verification with traditional automated functional testing tools can be very challenging.

It can be easily achieved by integrating Selenium with Applitools. This talk mainly focuses on verifying the application’s graphical user interfaces (GUI) and finding the visual bugs using Applitools. It is very helpful for all sites having graphical functionalities like (charts, graph, dashboards etc).  Verify that the GUI appears correctly across all devices & browsers. The nature of visual testing can be complex. But with existing open source and commercial solutions, this complexity is manageable, making it easier to automate than it once was. And the payoff is well worth the effort.

Take pressure off manual QA: increase coverage, test faster & more accurately.  Reduce maintenance efforts: automatically propagate changes across execution environments. Release faster, with confidence & flawless.

Applitools Eyes Express captures the screen you want to test, and compares it to a baseline image – instantly, with a single click. No extra testing code necessary, no boring error logs.

For example, a single automated visual test will look at a page and assert that every element on it has rendered correctly. Effectively checking hundreds of things and telling you if any of them are out of place. This will occur every time the test is run, and it can be scaled to each browser, operating system, and screen resolution you care about.

Put another way, one automated visual test is worth hundreds of assertions. And if done in the service of an iterative development workflow, then you’re one giant leap closer.

Each of these tools follows some variation of the following work flow:

1. Drive the application under test (AUT) and take a screenshot
2. Compare the screenshot with an initial “baseline” image
3. Report the differences
4. Update the baseline as needed

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said: I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Tool evangelists around the world have been using this phrase for selling their products. They make it a point to look into customer’s eyes and say “Scalability, you know, that’s the main problem with Selenium. What about 3 years down the line, when you have multiple applications in your landscape and Selenium does not support it?”

But they simply ignore the fact, knowingly off course, that this ever belting technology world is going where Selenium is right now. Applications are shrinking into browser windows and changing tracks to align itself to this mobile era.

Even commercial tool like TestComplete from SmartBear has started supporting Selenium and many will follow soon. Reason for this change is not only that most of the organizations are preferring open source tools like Selenium for starting point of their automation activities but also the fact that Selenium by far has proven itself to be one of the best automation tools when it comes to mobile or browser based desktop automation.

Here our aim is to display how seamlessly Selenium integrates with TestComplete and QAComplete and it is for us to understand that it is not Selenium which needs other tools to extend it but it is the other way round.

Element Locator strategies for Selenium WebDriver are highly flexible, and have been later inherited by many commercial tools. Although the locator strategies are flexible, they are also limited in a sense that, Selenium WebDriver does not currently allow its users to identify/filter UI elements with multiple locator strategies(at a time), as many commercial tools do.

The solution discussed in this article describes a library that allows Selenium WebDriver users to extend the Selenium element locator strategies for Element Filtering and few use cases for the library.

The solution approach allows users to continue to use the existing UI Element definitions in their tests, and extend them, using the By reference. The library will replace the existing Selenium WebDriver “By” reference.

Filtering based on multiple locator strategies

There are various scenarios where to uniquely identify an UI element, a complex XPath has to be written. However, the element can be identified uniquely using multiple locator strategies for the UI Element. The UI Elements can also be filtered, when there are multiple matches in a page. This is the UI Element recognition mechanism used in many commercial test automation tools.

The algorithm for filtering UI Elements based on multiple locator strategies is based on priority of locator strategies. The priority of locator strategies when filtering is:

1. ID
2. Name
3. TagName
4. ClassName
5. XPATH
6. LinkText and PartialLinkText
7. CSS

The By.elementFilter method takes multiple locator strategies, and searches the page for elements matching a particular locator strategy/property, and checks if it is a unique match on the page, if not then it uses the next locator strategy passed to it and so on.

This method is also very helpful when the application undergoes constant changes and UI Elements might have either of XPATH, ID , NAME, TagName, ClassName etc still unchanged. That way, it helps reduce a lot of maintenance effort in Selenium WebDriver implementations which is due to UI element changes.

Filtering based on Index

When there are multiple similar UI Elements in a page, such as cells in a grid/table, it makes sense to identify objects based on their Index based on their appearance on the web page.

The By.indexFilter method allows users to define an UI Element based on its Index of occurrence of the UI Element. The Index starts from 1.

Filtering based on relative element

When a UI element cannot be identified uniquely and reliably by any of its properties, but has some elements in its hierarchy or relative to a particular element, this method can be used to identify the element

The By.relationFilter method allows users to define an UI Element in relation to another element. The relation can be defined as “Left”, ”Right”, ”Top”, ”Bottom”, ”Child”, ”Parent”

Filtering for Tables

When dealing specifically with Tables, which have the

html tag, the By.tableFilter method allows the user to quickly identify specific cells in the table, without having to write complex XPaths or logics to achieve the same.

The By.tableFilter method allows users to define a cell in the table with Row,Column numbers. This allows users to directly use the UI Element in their code instead of writing their logic each time. This also increases efficiency and readability of the code.

Responsive Website Design have enabled mobile phones and tablets to fundamentally changed how we interact with the internet. Now we have instant access to any website we choose to visit and this causes headaches for testers, especially automated testers.

This changes how automation, specifically Selenium, is implemented as the test suite needs to be maintainable, which is difficult and will get unruly if not maintained.

The talk will be specifically about responsive websites however the same techniques can be applied to native app testing.

Utilizing a test case generator allows for the test conditions(browser, OS and resolution) to exist outside of the test itself allows a single test to be able to test against all testing combinations without having to code for the other options explicitly. With the different options outside of the test the driver is easily instantiated and the browser windows are modified prior to test execution.

As a sole(or two man team) automated test engineer for 4 years in over 5 projects these are my tools and techniques on how to make your automated test suite not only maintainable but adaptable to any device that you need to test with minimal overhead.

In modern cloud aeon, customers are delivered with UI and API for most of the Enterprise Products. The QE teams have to test the product for UI and APIs from functional as well as non functional perspective. For these they typically end up writing different test suites.

There are lot of challenges one faces when automating test suites for these different purposes, like

1. How do you integrate UI automation seamlessly with different test frameworks/suites?
2. How do you test all these requirements (UI, API, Performance etc.) effectively without a lot of redundant or duplicate code?
3. How do you use the best fit language/technology for UI automation and still do not impact the grand test automation strategies?

There is an interesting solution to conquer these challenges which I have recently implemented in one of my projects. 

The idea is to segregate tests from the UI Automation OR webdriver code. This code can be exposed as a web service APIs. Such service allows us to write common tests for UI as well as API. Tests written for API testing can be reused for UI testing with very minimal configuration modification like pointing to appropriate web service. These UI Automation APIs can also be called easily from any performance test requiring UI interaction.

This approach will enable any test suite using any language or technology in your organization to reuse UI automation seamlessly. This will also make lot of things straight and simple for execution and management across the verticals.

We will deep dive into the technical solution for this in this talk.